Kenneth Lane Thompson is an American pioneer of computer science. Thompson worked at Bell Labs for most of his career where he designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C programming language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating system. Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-developed the Go programming language.
Brian Kernighan (left) and Ken Thompson (right) in 2019
DEC PDP-7, as used for initial work on Unix
Bell Labs is an American industrial research and scientific development company. Researchers from there are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL, and others. Ten Nobel Prizes and five Turing Awards have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.
An aerial photo of Bell Labs' headquarters in Murray Hill, New Jersey in 2012
Bell's 1893 Volta Bureau building in Washington, D.C.
The Bell Laboratories Building, built at 463 West Street in New York City in 1925
The Old Bell Labs Holmdel Complex, located about 20 miles south of New York City, in New Jersey